This week’s seminar is about two historians whose approaches illustrate
another side of the academic culture of the first-half of the twentieth
century. Both produced enormously influential
studies of the Roman economy. Born in Kiev in 1870, Mikhail Ivanovich Rostovtzeff
was based in Russia until 1918 when he was driven into exile by the Bolsheviks.
He first took refuge in Oxford where he began his seminal work, The Social
and Economic History of the Roman Empire (1926). Having failed to find
acceptance in Britain, he moved on to the United States of America in 1920,
first to the University of Wisconsin and then in 1925 to Yale University where
he remained until his death in 1952. A Belgian born in
1862, Henri Pirenne was also profoundly affected by the events of the First
World War. Though descended from a family of Walloon (i.e. French-speaking
Belgian) industrialists, he had a position at the University of Ghent in
the northern, Flemish-speaking, part of Belgium. His son was killed at
the Battle of Yser in 1914, and it was in a German internment camp, to
which he had been sent in 1916 for refusing to collaborate with their plans
to reform his university as a nationalist, ‘Flemish’, institution,
that he formulated what became known as the ‘Pirenne Thesis’,
a radical theory about the origins of the European economy. Pirenne published
his ideas in a series of articles which appeared in 1922 and 1923. Mahomet
et Charlemagne,
a unified account of the theory, appeared two years after his death in
1935. An English translation followed in 1939.

Cosmopolitan intellectuals of bourgeois origin, Rostovtzeff and Pirenne looked
at the Roman Empire from much the same perspective. Both were concerned to
refute crude, racialised, views of the past of the kind represented by Tenney
Frank. Both argued that trade, enterprise, the cities and ‘the middle classes’ were
crucial to the prosperity and civilisation of the Greco-Roman world. But, working
at almost exactly the same time, without direct knowledge of each other’s
work, and in different countries, they arrived at somewhat different conclusions,
not least with regard to how the Roman economy coped over the long term. Though
there are important similarities in their views of how that economy worked,
they account for its decline and failure in radically different ways.

For Rostovtzeff the crucial period was the so-called crisis of the third century,
a period of fifty years from 235 until 284 when the Empire was ruled by no
less than thirty emperors. Most were proclaimed by the army in one region of
the empire and lasted a few years before falling victim to a rebellion originating
from some other region. The empire’s recovery from this crisis was accompanied
by a change in the style and operation of government effected by generals of
relatively humble social background, above all the emperors Diocletian and
Constantine. They ruled with the support of a vastly expanded army and bureaucracy.
They passed laws which gave the state much greater control over taxation and
internal order, and they transformed the style and organisation of the imperial
court, elaborating its rituals and its hierarchies of officials. Rostovtzeff
saw this change as a revolution in government perpetrated by the peasantry
acting through the army: it was driven by the rank-and-file’s jealousy of
the urban ‘bourgeoisie’,
and its upshot was the disappearance of ‘the active and thrifty citizens
of the thousands of cities in the Empire, who formed the link between the lower
and the upper classes’. Rostovtzeff would later, within a few years of publishing The
Social and Economic History, repudiate the idea that the actions of the army
were driven by class antagonism, but he continued to regard the oppression
of the urban middle classes as a crucial factor in the Decline and Fall of
Rome.

For Pirenne the crucial period was the seventh century. In his view the Roman
economy was ‘not greatly altered by the invasions’, but survived largely
intact until the seventh century when the rise of Islam destroyed the unity
of the Roman world. In his view it was the conquest of the lands bordering the
eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea by the Arabs which destroyed
the trade network which was the basis of the Roman prosperity. Direct trade was
inhibited by religious warfare. Forced to rely on its own resources western Europe
reverted to a pre-Roman, agricultural, economy which operated at subsistence level
with no long-distance trade. It was only when the north was reconnected with the
Byzantine and Islamic worlds at later date and by alternative routes that the
West revived. Pirenne was one of the first historians to challenge the late nineteenth-/early
twentieth-century consensus that the constitutional narrative was central to
understanding the fate of the Roman world – and one of the first to place
its end in the West well after the arrival of the barbarians.

Pirenne, Henri, Mohammed and Charlemagne, trs. B. Miall (London,
1939). Ideally students should read all of part one (‘Western Europe
before Islam’), but for the purposes of the present seminar it will
be enough to have read one extract from part one, ‘Money and the Monetary
Circulation’ (pp.
107–17), the conclusion to part one (pp. 140–4), and the conclusion to
part two (‘Islam and the Carolingians’). These
sections may be downloaded from the website. The entire book is available
on short loan at MB.*

Worksheet Questions

How, according to (a) Rostovtzeff and (b) Pirenne, did the Roman economy work?

What, according to (a) Rostovtzeff and (b) Pirenne, were the crucial changes
that brought about a weakening of the Roman Economy?

When, according to (a) Rostovtzeff and (b) Pirenne, did these changes take
place and what consequences did they have? What was it exactly that was lost
with the decline of the economy in each of these scenarios?

Why do Rostovtzeff and Pirenne emphasise such different turning points
in their arguments? A clue: think about the different backgrounds and experiences
of the two men.

Duncan-Jones, R.., ‘Economic Change and the Transition to Late Antiquity’,
in S. Swain and M. Edwards (eds), Approaching Late Antiquity: The Transformation
from Early to Late Empire (Oxford, 2004), pp. 20–52. LVL.

Hodges, R. C., and D. Whitehouse, ‘The Decline of the Western Empire’,
in L. K. Little and B. H. Rosenwein (eds), Debating the Middle Ages: Issues
and Readings (Malden, Mass, 1998), pp. 58–72. MB7. There are also two
copies of this book on long loan. This is an abbreviated version of a chapter
in Hodges, R. C., and D. Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins
of Europe: Archaeology and the Pirenne Thesis (London, 1983), pp. 20–53.
OQH.

Krause, J.-U., and C. Witschel (eds), Die Stadt in der Spätantike—Niedergang
oder Wandel? Akten des internationalen Kolloquiums in München am 30.
und 31. Mai 2003, Historia Einzelschriften 190 (Stuttgart, 2006). LVL.H.
The proceedings of a recent conference about the decline or transformation
of the city in late antiquity: many of the articles are in English, so
don’t
be put off by the title.

Little, L. K. (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of
541–750 (Cambridge,
2007). HQZA3.B.

McCormick, M., Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce,
AD 300–900 (Cambridge, 2001). MBD.E. See also R. C. Hodges, ‘Pirenne
after McCormick’, in his Goodbye to the Vikings? Re-reading Early
Medieval Archaeology (London, 2006), pp. 176–86. MB4.